Tattoo artist Bruno Ferreira has inked countless superheroes and superstars on to Brazilian bodies during his 25-year career: Wonder Woman, Batman, Ayrton Senna and Pelé.
But when Adauto Gomes Nascimento marched into his studio earlier this year, he had a different personality in mind: a muscular, shaven-headed supreme court judge called Alexandre de Moraes, who is now one of Brazil’s biggest and most controversial celebrities.
“He means everything to me. He’s someone who sticks up for Brazil … He’s a good person and a good judge,” said Nascimento, a 37-year-old butcher from the Amazon city of Belém, explaining why he spent six hours and 3,000 reais (£410, $550) to get Moraes’s face immortalized on his shin.
If tattooing a supreme court judge’s face on to your leg seems a peculiar decision, Brazil’s exceptional political landscape helps explain Nascimento’s choice.
Moraes is the judge presiding over the historic trial of Jair Bolsonaro, which began in the capital Brasília last week. And Moraes’s quest to hold Brazil’s ex-president to account for allegedly engineering a coup after he lost the 2022 election to his arch-rival, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has made the pugnacious, muay thai-fighting magistrate a hero – and even a sex symbol – for progressives and a hated figure for Bolsonaro’s devotees.
Even Elon Musk, one of Bolsonaro’s most famous foreign fans, has called the 56-year-old jurist “an evil dictator cosplaying as a judge” and “Brazil’s Darth Vader”, and compared him to the Harry Potter villain Lord Voldemort.
“He intrigues and fascinates his detractors and his admirers in equal measure,” said the journalist Thais Bilenky, who made a six-part podcast about Moraes called Alexandre. “I don’t think there’s anyone who inspires so much love and so much hate, so much fear and so much admiration, as him.”
Moraes’s path to becoming one of Brazil’s most influential and contentious figures begins in São Paulo in 1986 – a year after democracy was restored following two decades of military rule. That was when a teenage Moraes enrolled at Brazil’s top law school – an elite institution that has educated a third of the country’s 39 presidents – and took his first steps towards becoming a household name known simply as “Xandão”, or “Big Al”.
Today, many leftwing Brazilians hail Moraes as the saviour of the world’s fifth largest democracy. But during his university days Moraes was a man of the right. “The last thing he would have had in his room was a Che poster!” his friend Floriano de Azevedo Marques Neto told the French newspaper Le Monde in 2023.
After graduating, Moraes built a reputation as a no-nonsense workaholic – and an enviable CV. He came first in the entrance exam to become a public prosecutor and, in his late 20s, proved his mettle by taking on one of Brazil’s most powerful politicians, São Paulo’s then mayor, Paulo Maluf, during a corruption investigation called “Chickengate”. Moraes also found time to write a 1,000-page tome about constitutional law that sold hundreds of thousands of copies.
In 2002, at age 33, Moraes moved into politics, becoming the youngest justice secretary in São Paulo’s history. Among his missions was to clean up the state’s abuse-ridden young offender institutions. Eloísa Machado, a law professor who then worked as a human rights lawyer defending incarcerated teens, recalled her first encounter with Moraes, in early 2005. After she denounced torture in one detention centre, Moraes went there in person and ordered the arrest of more than 20 staff. “It was the first time [in Brazil] that anyone had been arrested on the spot for torturing teenagers,” Machado said, adding: “He’s always had this combative profile.”
By 2015, Moraes’s fame was spreading. He became São Paulo’s public security secretary – a job that gave him control over policing in Brazil’s biggest city and most populous state – and was vilified by leftists for what they considered his authoritarian response to protests against the impeachment of Brazil’s leftwing president Dilma Rousseff. On one occasion, Moraes compared leftist demonstrators to guerrillas.
Opposition politicians were aghast when Rousseff’s successor, the conservative Michel Temer, invited Moraes to be his justice minister in 2016, and, a year later, appointed the 48-year-old as the supreme court’s youngest member. Gleisi Hoffmann, a close Lula ally, called Moraes a threat to democracy.
But such bad blood was soon forgotten. After Bolsonaro took power in January 2019, Moraes quickly became one of the most energetic and effective opponents of the far-right politician’s authoritarian designs.
He ran a series of supreme court investigations into the president and his allies; blocked social media accounts belonging to far-right activists; and ordered controversial police raids on wealthy Bolsonaro supporters suspected of discussing a coup.
On the eve of the 2022 election – widely seen as one of the most consequential in Brazilian history – Moraes became president of the court responsible for organizing elections and was widely credited with taking decisive action to keep the vote on track, despite Bolsonaro’s alleged attempt to steal it.
On the day of the election’s crucial second round, Moraes helped frustrate an alleged attempt to use highway police to obstruct Lula voters, by threatening to arrest their commander. When Bolsonaro supporters ran riot on 8 January 2023, after Lula’s inauguration, the judge suspended Brasília’s governor as federal authorities battled to regain control.
“Brazil owes him a lot,” the supreme court judge Gilmar Mendes said of Moraes recently, reflecting the widely held view that his colleague had been instrumental in protecting democracy.
Hardcore Bolsonaristas disagree – and even some progressives worry Moraes may have overstepped his constitutional authority in his crusade to protect democracy. A sprawling supreme court inquiry into fake news – created in 2019 to tackle an explosion of far-right misinformation – has been under way for six years and it remains unclear when the investigation might conclude, or precisely who has been targeted, and why.
At protests, Bolsonaristas wield placards claiming their country has become “a judicial dictatorship” and hurl insults and obscenities at Moraes. “He’s the uncircumcised son of Belial!” one pro-Bolsonaro marcher, Francisco Antônio, fumed at a recent rally in the capital.
Sebastião Coelho, a retired Bolsonarista judge, accused Moraes of trampling on the constitution and demanded his impeachment: “Alexandre de Moraes isn’t a judge … He’s a criminal who is laying waste to our country.”
Officials in Donald Trump’s administration have echoed that rhetoric, accusing Moraes and his fellow judges of leading a “witch-hunt” against the US president’s South American ally. In July Moraes was sanctioned by the US treasury for allegedly leading “an oppressive campaign of censorship, arbitrary detentions that violate human rights and politicized prosecutions – including against former president Jair Bolsonaro”.
Those who have tracked Moraes’s career doubt such pressure will make him cave in over Bolsonaro’s trial, which is due to conclude on 12 September, with a conviction and hefty sentence thought likely.
“He’s a powerful person who isn’t afraid – he’s always on the attack,” Nascimento, the Amazon butcher, said of the man tattooed on to his limb. “I like this about him too. He really goes for it … He gets things sorted.”
